Description:

Most books that use MATLAB are aimed at readers who know how
to program. This book is for people who have never programmed
before.

As a result, the order of presentation is unusual. The book starts
with scalar values and works up to vectors and matrices very
gradually. This approach is good for beginning programmers, because
it is hard to understand composite objects until you understand basic
programming semantics. But there are problems:

The MATLAB documentation is written in terms of matrices,
and so are the error messages.
To mitigate this problem, the book explains the necessary
vocabulary early and deciphers some of the messages that
beginners find confusing.

Many of the examples in the first half of the book are
non-standard MATLAB. I address this problem in the second
half by translating the examples into a more idiomatic style.

The book puts a lot of emphasis on functions, in part because they are
an important tool for controlling program complexity, and also because
they are useful for working with MATLAB tools like fzero and
ode45.

I assume that readers know calculus, differential equations,
and physics, but not linear algebra. I explain the
math as I go along, but the descriptions might not be enough for
someone who hasn't seen the material before.

There are small exercises within each chapter, and a few larger
exercises at the end of some chapters.

This is version 1.1 of the book. It is a work in
progress, so I welcome suggestions and corrections.
Please send them to
downey at greenteapress dot com.

Physical Modeling in MATLAB
is a free book available
under the
GNU Free Documentation License. Readers are free to
copy and distribute the text; they are also free to modify
it, which allows them to adapt the book to different needs,
and to help develop new material.